BOOKS @ VOLUME #69 (7.4.18)
To find out what we've been reading, and for suggestions for what to read next, read our latest NEWSLETTER.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #69 (7.4.18)
To find out what we've been reading, and for suggestions for what to read next, read our latest NEWSLETTER.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Hear Stella review the book (without singing) on Radio NZ National (podcast).
>> Read an extract.
>> Pursuing an abstract form of writing.
>> Ball talks about writing the book.
>>...and about walking around with his dog.
>> Ball talks about how his relationship with his brother, who had Down Syndrome, led him to write this book.
>> The New Zealand Down Syndrome Association.
>> Other books by Jesse Ball at VOLUME.
 | In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon {Reviewed by THOMAS} Unless we are wrested by a pervasive trauma from the entire set of circumstances which constitute our identities, which are always contextual rather than intrinsic, our memories are never kept solely within the urns of our minds, so to call them, but are frequently prodded, stimulated and remade by elements beyond ourselves, or, indeed, are outsourced to these elements. Brian Dillon’s In the Dark Room is thoughtful examination of the way in which his memories of his parents, who both died as he was making the transition into adulthood, are enacted through the interplay of interior and exterior elements (the book is divided into sections: ‘House’, ‘Things’, ‘Photographs’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Places’). It is the physical world, rather than time, that is the armature of memory: time, or at least our experience of it, is contained in space, is, for us, an aspect of space, of physical extension, of objects. It is through objects that the past reaches forward and grasps at the present. And it is through the dialogue with objects that we call memory that these objects lose their autonomy and become mementoes, bearers of knowledge on our behalf or in our stead. Memory both provides access to and enacts our exclusion from the spaces of the past to which it is bound. In many ways, when the relationship between the object and the memory seem closest, this relationship is most fraught. Photographs, which Dillon describes as “a membrane between ourselves and the world,” are not so much representations as obscurations of their subjects. The subjects of photographs both inhabit an immediate moment and are secured by them in the “debilitating distance” of an uninhabitable past. When Dillon is looking at a photograph of his mother, “the feeling that she was manifestly present but just out of reach was distinctly painful. … Photography and the proximity of death tear the face from its home and memory and set it adrift in time.” All photographs (and, indeed, all associative objects) are moments removed from time and so are equivalents, contesting with interior memories to be definitive. Photographs, even more than other objects, but other objects also, are mechanisms of avoidance and substitution as much as they are mechanisms of preservation. Memory, illness, death all distort our experience of time, but so does actual experience, and it is this distortion that generates memory, that imprints the physical with experience “spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina” (in the words of George Eliot). Intense experience, especially traumatic experience, death, illness, loss, violence, occlude the normal functions of memory and push us towards the edges of consciousness, touching oblivion as they also imprison us in the actual. As Dillon found, if experience cannot be experienced all at once, the context of the experience can bear us through, but it must be revisited in memory, repeatedly, until the experience is complete, if this is ever possible. Memory will often co-opt elements of surroundings to complete itself, and, especially if associative objects are not present, it will magnify its trauma upon unfamiliar contexts, increasing the separation and isolation it also seeks to overcome. Must the past be faced as directly as possible so that we may at last turn away from it? When reading this book I was often reminded of The Book of Mutter by Kate Zambreno, which also concerns itself with the problematics of memories associated with a deceased parent. >>Read my review here. |
 | Census by Jesse Ball {Reviewed by STELLA} Census is a beautiful portrait of parental love. Jesse Ball’s novel is dedicated to his brother, who died at 24. As a child, the author believed he would be his sibling’s carer. In the forward, Ball talks about the difficulty of writing a book from the perspective of a Down Syndrome adult: how to capture the perspective of someone who sees and experiences the world differently; someone who you have known and loved, who you have more memories of as a child than as an adult. His resolution is to place him at the centre. “I would make a book that was hollow. He would be there in effect.” Taking his childhood role as carer, Ball places himself in the role of the father. The book opens with the father finding out he has an incurable disease. He quits his job as a doctor and takes on the task of a census taker, packing himself and his son into their car to travel through towns from A to Z. There are notes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in this premise. This is the last journey. The Census Taker is sent out with a series of questions and the tools of his trade - a tattooing machine - with which he must mark the participants’ rib. The faceless and nameless bureaucracy of the Census is slightly Kafkaesque: reports are to be sent in and instructions adhered to without any obvious repercussions for disobedience. As they travel further along the road, entering townships increasingly decayed - industrial decline and poverty-stricken farming communities - the father’s questions change. What he seeks are different answers, ones that will explain his own situation, his son’s future and his own pain. Will the world be kind or cruel to his son? Who will protect him? Ball cleverly weaves in the memories of the father with the lives of those they meet on the journey. The small vignettes - tales of heartache, redemption and loss - help us see the relationship between father and son with increased clarity and give shape to the figure of the son. The interactions with the townspeople also help us to see the son: how people respond, and the father’s observations put humanity - both its care and harshness - under the spotlight. The writing is superb: lyrical yet spare. Unsentimental, beautiful and intelligent, Jesse Ball’s novel Census is outstanding. If you read one novel this year, make it this one. |
NEW RELEASES
("Read us!")
An accomplished, thoughtful and somewhat melancholy novel, tracking the thoughts of an expectant mother whose own mother has just died, whose ruminations on the mind, the body, living and dying encompass swathes of science and philosophy (as well as her own life).
"The writing is poised – but as if on the edge of a precipice. Hovering between the novel and the essay, unfolding through long, languorous sentences, Sight builds meaning through juxtaposition, through surprising mirrorings and parallels. - Guardian
Beautifully and thoughtfully written, these stories of the abrupt interpersonal mechanisms of life in modern China, and of the alternative existence offered in literature are affecting and memorable. (The title is a quote from Katherine Mansfield, BTW.)
"Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid beauty." - Mary Gaitskill
"A remarkable account of literary life [from] an important and gifted writer. Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life." - Marilynne Robinson
>> Trauma and breakdown.
Ostensibly a memoir of sixteen years living with her dog, Rosie, Afterglow is a beautifully written contemplation of everything that has touched on Myles's life in that time.
"A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that's really about life and everything there is, Eileen Myles's Afterglow is a truly astonishing creation." - Helen Macdonald (author of H is for Hawk)
"Reading Afterglow is like entering the company of a sensibility that is rich, original, witty, and tonally brilliant. It is the darting asides, the phrasing and the subplots that matter most in this book, that give pure, sheer constant pleasure." - Colm Toibin
A city is in the throes of social strife, with the poor and disadvantaged pushed to the edges, both physically and politically. Can two brothers navigate in the abandoned barge they requisition and find a new way of life?
"Thick with smoky atmosphere and beautifully controlled - this is a vivid and very fine debut." - Kevin Barry
"The Romulus and Remus of a refugee nation embark upon a drift across livid cities, liberatory canals and compromised occupations in a parallel present mere millimetres from our own. Langley gives to the reader the taste of the Molotov fumes and the bloody heft of the personal-political in this propulsive, acid fable, a dérive for the age of urbex. How can the orphaned subject escape the surveillance state? Read on to find out. We, also, are in Arcadia." — Mark Blacklock
>> Read an extract.
In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are the facts. Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted.
"Devastatingly powerful. A searing meditation on myth, history, and the persistence of poison in all its terrible forms. Bolander gives voice to the voiceless with such controlled and perfect fury the pages seem to char and burn as you read. It feels like an alternate 'Just So' story revealed to us by an ecstatic punk oracle. I can't stop thinking about it." - Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk
In 1922, a 48-year-old housewife from Blackburn delivered her first paper, on native Australian orchids, to the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Over the next thirty years, Edith Coleman would write over 300 articles on Australian nature for newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. She would solve the mystery of orchid pollination that had bewildered even Darwin, earn the acclaim of international scientists and, in 1949, become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion. She was 'Australia's greatest orchid expert', 'foremost of our women naturalists', a woman who 'needed no introduction'. And yet, today, Edith Coleman has faded into obscurity. This book should correct that.
A definitive collection of over 400 regional and traditional recipes, organised by course and accompanied by insightful notes. Soups, noodles, rices, pickles, one-pots, sweets, and vegetables - all authentic and achievable at home.
Bookbinder Olga Hirsch (1889–1968) left her collection of 3,500 papers dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries to the British Library - one of the largest and most diverse collections of decorated papers in the world. This book contains reproductions of papers used as wrappers and endpapers for books, as the backing for playing cards, as linings for chests and cases, as pictures for display in churches and homes, as souvenirs for pilgrims, and as wrappings for foodstuffs such as gingerbread and chocolate.
What is it like to stand in court representing clients whose lives contain the full spectrum of human experience, right down to the unbelievably unfortunate? The courtroom is a crucible for both the best and worst of humanity. This book is "a searing first-hand account of the human cost of the criminal justice system." If the law is broken, can it be fixed?
The Dinner Guest by Gabriela Ybarra $35
At every meal, and extra place is set for someone who is absent - Ybarra's grandfather, who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table and erases on of those present. Ybarra's remarkable novel explores the ties of pain and absence that bind a family.
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
Get your democracy in order now! A compelling case for a democratic framework to safeguard our political system against current and future challenges. From the authors of A Constitution for New Zealand.
"I know no one ever believes us nowadays - everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing. It was all a well-kept secret. We believed it. We swallowed it. It seemed entirely plausible." Brunhilde Pomsel described herself as an `apolitical girl' and a `figure on the margins'. How are we to reconcile this description with her chosen profession? Employed as a typist during the Second World War, she worked closely with one of the worst criminals in world history: Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. She was one of the oldest surviving eyewitnesses to the internal workings of the Nazi power apparatus until her death in 2017. Her life, mirroring all the major breaks and continuities of the twentieth century, illustrates how far-right politics, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships can rise, and how political apathy can erode democracy. Compelling and unnerving.
An explorer's guide to the chasm between art and politics, and to the cultural forces that lurk there. Can art catalyse historical moments into philosophical truth?
>> What makes contemporary art contemporary?
A Surrealist artist himself but better known as a zoologist and ethnologist, Morris is an excellent guide to the people who, rebelling against the strictures of modern life, devised modes of access to the workings of the unconsciousness, which they allowed expression in literature and art.
Born to a Jewish family in Estonia in 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia; by the time of his death in 1974, he was widely recognised as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces built during the last fifteen years of his life.
>> Fisher House.
" A lyrical evocation of Ireland's fragile, ancient coastline reveals a poet's sensitivity. The multi-layered story of love and loss, of a woman 'erased by grief' is exceptionally moving." - Eleanor Fitzsimons
An insightful analysis of Syriza and the orchestrated failure of their responses to Greece's political and economic crisis. What can the rest of the world learn from Syriza's model and the opposition it was met with?
A remarkable grimdark fantasy, centering (mostly) around the exploits of Rygnir Wyndfallen, a beast-child drawn by a self-imposed doom to places his tiny life has never been. The world collapses into undead ruin around him and even time cannot uphold itself. Beautifully (and grimly) illustrated in colour throughout.
>> Preview Chapter One.
Fenster induced a fever in herself and was ready to follow whatever literary threads emerged from this experience. The resulting book covers her whole life, her relationship with her parents and others, and ruminations on bravery, transgression, vulnerability and art. "Fever is a particularly writerly thing," she writes.
>> Feverish on the radio.
An enjoyable account of both the history and the contemporary texture of the Cuban capital.
A Shadow Above: The fall and rise rise of the raven by Joe Shute $35
Insight into both the legendary and natural history of the highly intelligent bird we have used to represent death, all-seeing power, the underworld, and wildness itself.
>> Ravens are even ventriloquists.
River gets a chance to crew on his uncle's fishing boat. He is annoyed by his cousin Huia and all her talk pf Maoritanga, but, when they find themselves stranded in Fiordland, he learns a lot from her as they try to survive in inhospitable country.
“I didn’t last in Austenworld, but for a time it was ludicrous, intoxicating, and sometimes heartbreaking." By birth a Janeite (his mother was a noted scholar), Scheinman grew up eating Yorkshire pudding, singing in an Anglican choir, and watching Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy. Amusing (and with insights into the Cult).
>> The Jane Austen Fight Club.
(But is zero even a number?)
After the assassination of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray fled America and spent some time in Lisbon before his apprehension. This novel weaves speculation about Ray's time in Lisbon with an author's quest for fulfillment.
30 tiny books to make, read and treasure, and a library scene to display them in! Fun.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #68 (31.3.18)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER. Find out what we've been reading. Browse the week's New Releases. Learn about this week's Book of the Week and about the upcoming Poetry Course.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an excerpt.
>> An actor reads an extract.
>> Ariana Harwicz and her publisher Carolina Orloff in conversation at our shop in Paris.
>> The author reads an extract in Spanish.
>> What is it like to be listed for the Man Booker International Prize?
>> Visit the website of Charco Press. The tiny Edinburgh-based press is run by two people (a New Zealander and an Argentinian) and is dedicated to publishing translations of contemporary Latin American literature.
>> Have a look at the other books published by Charco Press .
>> Read our reviews of other books were shortlisted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> Find out which other books have been long-listed for this year's Man Booker International Prize.
>> Follow the white rabbit.
 | The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch {Reviewed by STELLA} Channelling Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin and J.G. Ballard, Lidia Yuknavitch brings us The Book Of Joan, a startling portrayal of humanity devolved and earth decimated by warfare, lack of resources and an elite class who live on CIEL - a sub-orbital craft constructed from abandoned space stations. Here we meet Christine, living, if you can call it that, under the control of dictator Jean de Men. Christine is a narrator who scribes stories by burning them into flesh, her own and others'. The story she burns into her own is the Book of Joan, telling of Joan, the warrior who led the battle against Jean de Men and died heroically at the stake. On CIEL and on earth (where small clans of humans exist) there is an obsession with the body and the flesh. On CIEL they graft flesh and parade themselves ritualistically; on earth, they hark back to ritual stories of times before the geo-catastrophe. Joan is a martyr, a warrior girl who at sixteen leads an army against the mighty forces of General Jean de Men. Joan at ten enters the forest, a wild ancient forest in France, and has an encounter with nature that changes her, giving her powers one with the natural environment and against the destructive impulses of humanity. A blue light glows from within her from her temple and she quickly becomes a symbol of resistance and rebellion. Her constant dream is of a planet on fire, of humans warring with each other until they are dehumanised, and the choice she makes at sixteen is devastating. Is she a martyr or has she martyred her people? Captured by the ruling powers and tied to the stake to be burnt alive, she is given iconic status and becomes the story by which rebels defy the elite, ritualised within this new world order. Humanity is dying out - physical changes include the loss of hair, skin pigmentation and genitalia. On CIEL the physical appearance of the inhabitants is startling - they are porcelain white, smooth-skinned - hairless - decorated by obscene skin grafts and some by words burnt into their flesh - a ritual that keeps stories alive through pain and precision. The geo-catastrophe on earth has left those that remain with few resources and a mistrust of their fellows. Most live in isolated clans underground, and as we see this world only through the eyes of Joan and her mate, Leone, we know only as much as they do - the odd person they meet or any who seek them out, and vague rumours of others. The world in 2049 is a blend of medieval practices and technology. CIEL draws what little resources are left from the earth through networks of tendril-like connections and has technology on its craft to stop it falling into the sun. At the heart of this novel is a fierce battle of morals. Jean de Men wants to draw Joan into his lair, into his reproduction laboratory, to harvest her for his own repopulation programme. He is mad and powerful. Christine, the narrator, driven by the desire to topple the overlord Jean de Men and by her obsession with Joan, wishes to raise Joan from myth through the power of words and thus create a rebellion on CIEL. Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan includes themes of reproduction, competition for resources and power, gender ambiguity and sexual obsession. These are common across several feminist fictions: Alderman’sThe Power, Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife and the revived The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Added to the dynamic plot is an intellectual layer - philosophical discussions about matter and the intertwining of history; the three main characters are drawn from French medieval personalities; warrior Jeanne d'Arc, early feminist authorChristine de Pizan and her nemesis, romantic poet and scholar Jean de Meun - and you have a compelling, strange and powerful book. |
 | Sphinx by Cat Woodward {Reviewed by THOMAS} Each poem in this excellent collection pits its voice both against silence and against the deluge of other voices suspended above it, or surrounding it, waiting for an opportunity to smother it. Every force is met with an equal and opposite force, or a baffling of that force that absorbs and reconstitutes and reclaims the force as its own, and under its own terms, terms that repudiate even the concept of force. The poems press against their surfaces, either bursting their forms or turning back upon themselves, entering the spaces they have left, increasing their weight and, concomitantly, the depth of their approach, increasing their intensity and also the release that that intensity enables through spaces opened up under pressure. The words and the impact of the words seldom occur simultaneously, the impact coming later, or, shockingly, somehow preceding the words. Similarly, the poems are often somehow geared so that the humour and the blades rotate in opposite directions, each impacting when least expected and from behind. The poems often create or explore a breach in the habits of subject/object relations: to be aware of something is to be that thing, to be swamped, overwhelmed, possessed by that thing, to think something is likewise to be that thing, to be swamped, overwhelmed, possessed. But somehow, through facing the threat directly, we find release enough through the heart of the image, to find emptiness and loss where the presence of the subject is most intense, to find release at the core of presence. Associative leaps leave behind the experience that induced them, pushing experience back into the past by the force of the leap, both retaining and denying the experience that induced them. Often drawing on folkloric elements and pulling at a strand of poetic animism that runs back through English nature poetry to medieval times, Woodward creates poems that have a referential hum of ambiguous valency, either mock-pagan and mock-transpersonal or pagan and transpersonal, only to have these polarities continually and playfully reversed. Each symbol outweighs its referent and replaces it, becoming a non-symbol. Each part replaces the whole and becomes no longer a surrogate for that whole but a whole in its own right, casting the body from which it has wrested itself free into a horizon, a backdrop, a context. There are hurts behind these works, whether of personal or existential nature it is irrelevant to speculate, and the poems reach out to cruelty, but often tenderly, with the tenderness with which one would deliberately and sustainedly press one’s hand or soft flesh down upon a knifeblade. At other times an anger surprises an image and draws a weapon unexpectedly from an idyll. Wherever an image comes from, it quickly becomes a source of fascination and also problematic, a threat to exactly the extent that it commands attention. It is necessary to face and enter the image, to turn the image inside out by passing through it, to overthrow and recalibrate (and Woodward does this so well) the lazy associations upon which poetry so often founders. Here dirty is neat and clean is messy and the bad thing is the neatest thing of all. The poems are aurally tight, at once exactly too much and just enough. There are no unnecessary words: each does its work of anger or of tenderness, of clarity and the disavowal of clarity. The poems simultaneously tighten and release, invite and repel, speak (and silence speech) with both tenderness and hatred. The reader (or hearer) is rewarded with a mixture of certainty and rejection, of wonderment and mockery. These poems are “an instruction guide to obtainable sobbing”, a shortcut to the bottom of the lake, a communing that will not be trivialised as communication. Cat will be teaching a five-session poetry course at VOLUME, commencing on 10 April. I think this will be excellent, both for beginning poets and for all poets wanting both to consider their craft and to explore the ways in which ideas can be achieved (in other words, for all poets). >> Find out more here. |
NEW RELEASES
Each poem in this excellent collection pits its voice both against silence and against the deluge of other voices suspended above it, waiting for an opportunity to smother it. Every word is effective and surprising, the whole geared so that the humour and the blades rotate in opposite directions. A form-bursting collection from a poet recently moved to Nelson from the UK.
>> Find out about the 5-week poetry course Cat will be teaching at VOLUME in April.
New Zealand's answer to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls! Inspiring stories and wonderful illustrations. Includes Whina Cooper, Janet Frame, Beatrice Tinsley, Frances Hodgkins, Georgina Beyer, Huria Matenga, Jane Campion, Joan Wiffen, Karen Walker, Kate Edger, Katherine Mansfield, Mai Chen, Merata Mita, Mojo Mathers, Patricia Grace, Suzie Moncrieff, Farah Palmer, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Lucy Lawless, Kate Sheppard, Nancy Wake, Sophie Pascoe, Margaret Mahy, Lydia Ko, Merata Mita, Lorde, Rita Angus and Te Puea Herangi. Illustrations by Sarah Laing, Sarah Wilkins, Fifi Coulston, Ali Teo, Helen Taylor, Phoebe Morris, Sophie Watkins, Rebecca ter Borg and Vasanti Unka.
How do lives and the narratives that impart these lives converge and overlay each other, and how is a translator able to correlate narratives not only across languages but across time? Beautifully constructed and written, a triple narrative both pulled towards and avoiding the darkness at its centre.
"One of the very best writers now at work in the English language, and a man whose writing, both in fiction and in critical studies, displays a unity of sensibility and intelligence and deep feeling difficult to overvalue at any time." - Guardian
>> Visit the cemetery.
Born in Rome during his artist father's sojourn there, Pinch grows up desperate to emulate him, both artistically and otherwise. Moving to London to teach Italian, Pinch begins to write a biography of his father, but when his father dies, he sees the opportunity to receive more from him than the father, when alive, was prepared to give. Subtle and perceptive.
When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past. What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine?
>> What are the possibilities of fiction in a post-truth world?
A widower cares for his adult son, who has Down Syndrome. When he learns that he hasn't long to live the man takes a job as a census taker for a mysterious government agency and takes to the road with his son.
"Census is a vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches." - David Mitchell
"Census is Ball's most personal and best to date. Think The Road by Cormac McCarthy with Ball’s signature surreal flourishes." - New York Times
"A poet by trade, Ball understands the economy of language better than most fiction writers today." - Huffington Post
"A devastatingly powerful call for understanding and compassion." - Publishers Weekly
Family life in Sheffield meets the brutal history of Bangladesh in this thoughtful, perceptive and uncompromising novel.
"Hensher is one of our most gifted novelists and this is certainly his best novel yet." - Guardian
An excellent history of social and private audiophilia and the societal changes concomitant with developments in recording technologies.
Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy and Lives are the seven things that have made our world and will continue to shape its future. By making these things cheap, modern commerce has controlled, transformed, and devastated the Earth.
We love and care for animals as pets, we weave them into our myths and fables, and then we breed them under conditions of terrible cruelty just so we can eat them cheaply. As new developments in research into animal cognition force us to concede fewer characteristics separating us from our neighbouring species, this issue of Granta asks writers, poets and photographers to consider the complex ways we interact with the animal kingdom. Includes contributions from Han Kang, Nell Zink and Yoko Tawada.
“My whole life has been one surrounded by water and my happiness can be accurately measured by proximity to it.” So begins Will Millard’s absorbing memoir about a lifetime’s obsession with fishing, in which he was joined by his grandfather. An evocation of British waterways and connections across generations.
Read this with a pencil at the ready: not only will you be making yourself a reading list, you'll be wanting to start writing love letters and break-up notes to the books that you love or that have disappointed you.
In the main square of Constantinople, a niche is carved into ancient stone. Here, the Ottoman sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital - a task he relishes and performs with fervour. But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price.
"The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details. It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale." - Sunday Times
"Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." - James Wood, The New Yorker
What can Aeschylus, Dante and Shakespeare teach us about resisting totalitarianism?
"Ismail Kadare's first and only collection of essays translated into English offers profound and highly personal meditations on 'great' writers in the world literary tradition. Kadare conceives of literature as art that 'cries with the world', seeking through letters to understand the uniquely and most deeply human: tragedy, violence, pain. The 'world' of Kadare's essays on 'world literature' is a reflection of his native Albania's 'impossible drama' on the global scale of human history, an observation at once parochial and profound, like the greatness of great art." - Sean Guynes-Vishniac, World Literature Today
It is an ordinary Tuesday morning in April when bored, lonely Charlie Fisher witnesses something incredible. Right before his eyes, in a busy square in Marseille, a group of pickpockets pulls off an amazing robbery. As the young bandits appear to melt into the crowd, Charlie realizes with a start that he himself was one of their marks. Yet Charlie is less alarmed than intrigued. This is the most thrilling thing that's happened to him since he came to France with his father, an American diplomat. So instead of reporting the thieves, Charlie defends one of them to the police, under one condition: he teach Charlie the tricks of the trade.
When the witch Rona Blackburn took vengeance against the men of Anathema Island, she also cursed her descendants to heartbreak, diminished magic, and an intrinsic bond to that remote northwestern locale. Now, ninth-generation Blackburn daughter Nor wants only to reach her 17th birthday leaving “the slightest mark humanly possible on the world. Despite physical and emotional scars, can she find the strength to stand against her villainous mother?
"An atmospheric, blood-drenched dark fantasy for a cold and stormy night." - Kirkus Reviews
Visit Catalonia's buzzing metropolis through its local dishes. An exciting addition to the excellent 'Cult Recipes' series.
Visit 45 towns around the world (including Featherston in New Zealand) that celebrate the printed word.
The history of feminism told through its individual active elements. What sorts of molecules could we construct from them?
One Knife, One Pot, One Dish: Simple French cooking at home by Stéphane Reynaud $45
Every short-cut that can be made, and every simplification, without compromising the authenticity or the deliciousness of these 160 classic recipes.
To elude the Nazi round-up of Polish Jews, a mother purchases fake Aryan ID papers, dresses her son as a girl (so his circumcision won't be discovered) and moves across Europe through displaced persons camps. The true story of the author's father and grandmother.
What, beyond aesthetics, is at play in the vast prices paid at auctions for contemporary art?
When Emmeline's scientist parents mysteriously disappear, she finds herself being packed off on a ship to France, heading for a safe house in Paris. On board she is befriended by an urchin stowaway called Thing. But before she can reach her destination she is kidnapped by the sinister Dr Siegfried Bauer. Dr Bauer is bound for the ice fields of Greenland to summon a legendary monster from the deep. And he isn't the only one determined to unleash the creature. The Northwitch has laid claim to the beast, too. Can Emmeline and Thing stop their fiendish plans and save the world?
The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary by Nonieqa Ramos $28
Macy's school officially classifies her as "disturbed," but Macy isn't interested in how others define her. She's got more pressing problems: her mother can't move off the couch, her father's in prison, her brother's been taken by Child Protective Services, and now her best friend isn't speaking to her. Writing in a dictionary format, Macy explains the world in her own terms.
At the end of the First World War, thousands of British war horses were left behind in the Middle East. Dorothy Brooke, a wealthy Scottish socialite, visited Cairo in 1930 and was appalled at their fate. She founded the Old War Horse Memorial Hospital, dedicated the welfare of these and other animals.
Our cultural fear of death has blinded us the very things that are most important in the last days of a life.
>> "We need to talk about dying." (Mannix on Radio NZ)
The Elizabethan tragedy rewritten as a blood-soaked police drama set in a rainy northern town in the 1970s.other animals.
A life split between her public and private personas, between crime and theatre, and between London and New Zealand.
Meet electrons and learn about their energy and what they can and cannot do. A non-condescending board book.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #67 (24.3.18)
Our latest NEWSLETTER. Read our reviews and recommendations, and find out about the week's new releases.
 | Feel Free by Zadie Smith {Reviewed by STELLA} Zadie Smith’s collection of essays covers several years, from 2010 to early 2017. Most of that time she is based in America, with small forays back to England to visit family and attend speaking events. As such she is a British subject looking from the outside and an outsider looking within. This makes for an interesting perspective of American and British politics and culture. The first essay rests easily in her home neighbourhood and decries the closing of the public library and the rise of private, over public, space. She’s visiting North-West London with her daughter - a witness to the unravelling of community. In several other essays she draws on her childhood in London and her family’s cultural background to add richness to her arguments and musings. The essays are observations of a time and place that sometimes feels like ancient history, although many are just a few years ago: these are the years of the Obama administration in America, and Theresa May is yet to appear on anyone’s radar. Brexit is in its infancy - a situation that Smith sees from afar, yet she already has a nuanced view. It is her essay about FaceBook, 'Generation Why?' - written in 2010 - which strikes home so succinctly, especially in light of the current Cambridge Analytica saga. Her focus isn’t so much about privacy issues - this is part and parcel of social media - but is an analytical breakdown of what FaceBook is, who Mark Zuckerberg is or represents, and the weirdly successful platform, so that once you read Smith’s essay you will be thinking about reaching for the disconnect button (if you haven’t already) or at least being aware of the strange, almost cult-like, philosophy that underpins FaceBook. The essays are divided into several clusters that cover politics, media, art and writing. While some of the essays refer to entertainment (television programmes), art or music that might be foreign to the reader, Smith is adept at contextualising these aspects into a broader discussion of race, cultural practice or social issues which help to bind the varied topics. And yet her essays are exceptionally personal: observations that can only come from her own experiences, her own world-view and where she stands in the world right now (or at the time of writing). Feel Free is an opportunity for Zadie Smith to explore - to mine her wealth of ideas - without the constraints of the novel form. The most successful explorations are areas where Smith is well-versed - in the writing section the essays about Ballard and Kureshi stand out - or has a layered personal history to draw from. Her essays on culture, race and social stratification (common themes in her novels) leave you with the most to think about. |
 | Lyla by Fleur Beale {Reviewed by STELLA} Fleur Beale is an exceptional writer and once again she gets into the head of a teenage girl. Lyla is thirteen, almost fourteen, when the Christchurch earthquake of February 22nd 2011 strikes. She’s in the city and a fog descends. “The white stuff in the air wasn’t fog, it was dust... So much dust. It swirled and lifted in great clouds.” She knows she has to get out. They all have an earthquake plan: go home. As she heads out of the city, she loses her friends, finds others she has to help, drawing on her ability to stay calm in a crisis - possibly having parents who are a police officer and a nurse might have helped. Once she’s home it’s not so easy. As the days go by, she feels helpless. Her mother is part of the emergency team in the city and her father, after not hearing from him for two days, is back at the hospital. Lyla is thirteen - too young for the student army, not allowed anywhere there is danger. Many of her friends have already left and her constant companion is her neighbour, Matt, a boy she really doesn’t have much time for. Yet Lyla and Matt find themselves working together to bring a sense of community back to their neighbourhood, to look after the younger children (the schools are closed and many of the adults are assisting with the crisis), helping their elderly neighbours and making friends as well as being actually quite helpful, in both practical and emotional ways, despite Lyla’s frustrations. However this is not merely a story about how communities come together, but a realistic account of the impact of the earthquake on Lyla - how trauma impacts you when you least expect it, and the anxiety that can’t be avoided when your whole world is tipped upside down and shaken (literally and figuratively). Lyla is part of the 'Through My Eyes: Natural Disaster Zones' series: the books enable children to understand the impact of a natural disaster and to empathise with a child in a crisis situation. |
 | Autoportrait by Édouard Levé {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I am inexhaustible on the subject of myself,” states Édouard Levé in this book which is nothing less than an attempt to exhaust everything that he can think of to say about himself, no matter how banal or embarrassing, with relentless objectivity. In one long string of seemingly random declarative statements without style or development or form (other than the form of the list, if a list can be said to be a form), the details accumulate with very fine grain, but the effect is disconcerting: the author comes no closer to exhausting his observations, and the idea that there is such a thing as a 'person' beyond the details seems more and more implausible. The list is not so much an accumulation as an obliteration: facts obscure that which they purport to represent. “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing.” Levé’s style is deliberately and perfectly and admirably flat throughout (all perfect things should be admired (whatever that means)), like that of a police report. “I try to write prose that will be changed neither by translation nor by the passage of time.” The constructions often feel aphoristic but eschew the pretension of aphorisms to refer to anything other than the particulars of which they are constructed. There is no lens formed by these sentences to ‘see through’, no insight, no intimation of personality other than the jumbled bundling of details and tendencies assembled under the author’s name, no ‘self’ that expresses itself through these details or is approachable through these details, because we are none of us persons other than what we for convenience or comfort (or, rather, out of frustration and fear) bundle conceptually, mostly haphazardly, and treat as an entity or ‘person’. The more fact is compounded (or, rather, facts are compounded), the stronger the intimation that any attempt to exhaust the description of a person will never be approach we usually think of as a person. “If I look in mirrors for long enough, a moment comes when my face stops meaning anything.” As well as demonstrating the impossibility of the task which it attempts, description also cancels itself by implying for each positive statement a complementary negative statement. Each statement of the self-description of Édouard Levé functions to include those of us among his readers who are similar and to exclude those who are dissimilar. We find each statement either in accord or in disagreement with a statement we could similarly (or dissimilarly) make about ourselves. The reader is charted in the text as much as the author. The reader is continually comparing themselves to the author, finding accord or otherwise, exercising the kind of judgement concealed beneath all social interaction but typically hidden by content and mutuality. In Autoportrait, the author’s self-obsession is matched by our fascination with him, with the kinds of details that may or may not come to light in social interchange. Because the author is not aware of us and is not reciprocally interested in us, or feigning reciprocal interest in us, as would be the case in ‘real life’ social interaction, we feel no shame in our fascination, our fascination is dispassionate, clinical. He is likewise unaffected by our interest or otherwise in him. But as well as bundling together an open set of details that we may conveniently think of as facts (“Everything I write is true, but so what?”) about Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’), the text also conjures an inverse Édouard Levé (or ‘Édouard Levé’) who is the opposite to him in every way, the person who nullifies him (in the way that all statements call into being their simple or compound opposites, their nullifiers). Levé’s obsession with identity, facsimile and the corrosive effects of representation reappear throughout the book, and towards the end he mentions the suicide of a friend from adolescence, which would form the basis for Levé’s final book, Suicide (after which Levé himself committed suicide). Édouard Levé was born on the same day as me, but on the other side of the planet. In Autoportrait he writes, “As a child I was convinced that I had a double on this earth, he and I were born on the same day, he had the same body, the same feelings I did, but not the same parents or the same background, for he lived on the other side of the planet, I knew that there was very little chance that I would meet him, but still I believed that this miracle would occur.” We never met and I am not that person. |
>> Simpson (who lives in Golden Bay) shares his love of tōtara.
>> An interview with Philip Simpson.
>> Tōtara are easy to grow (hint).
>> Threats to totara.
>> Totara for the future.
>> The book has been short-listed in the Illustrated Non-Fiction section of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
NEW RELEASES
The story begins when a masked man with “a message both obscure and appalling” appears at the door of the Marquis claiming a matter of life and death, declaring, “I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!”
Dispatched by the Queen of Spells from the Outer Hebrides, the Masked Man’s message was really just a polite request for the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. But the exchange gets botched… badly. And our masked man is now lost in America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing the author that created him.
"A profane wrestling match between high style and low comedy." - Kirkus
“Curtis White is a master of the digressive, philosophical novel. His new work Lacking Character provides another excellent example of this tradition. Lacking Character is very funny, bursting with wit and generosity. It evokes Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and the historical picaresque. There is Rabelais as well as the Soviet fairy tales of Kapek or Kharms, and the French symbolist films of Cocteau or Demy. Lacking Character is funny and heartbreaking.” — Entropy
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet's now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin. Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule - galvanised by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her.
"All my youth I gloried in the wild, exulting, rollercoaster prose and questing narratives of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac, but cringed at the misogyny; couldn't we have the former without the latter? We can, because: Lidia Yuknavitch. Buckle your seat belts; it's gonna be a wild feminist ride." - Rebecca Solnit"A raucous celebration, a searing condemnation, and fiercely imaginative retelling of Joan of Arc's transcendent life." - Roxane Gay
>> This Joan's not for burning.
>> The Small Backs of Children is also excellent.
When Alejandro Luque received a set of photographs taken of Jorge Luis Borges on his visit to Sicily in 1984 (two years before his death) in the company of Maria Kodama (his PA and, eventually, wife and literary executor), he decided to trace Borges' steps, see the sights that Borges did not see due to his blindness, and discover what he could learn about his literary hero and about other literary visitors to Sicily. An interesting, very Borgesian travelogue (illustrated with the photographs). Includes a brief appearance by the Mediterranean's most slovenly gorilla.
A monster created from human remains rampages around the streets of Baghdad. What qualifies as human in a city traumatised by war?
"An extraordinary piece of work. With uncompromising focus, Ahmed Saadawi takes you right to the wounded heart of war's absurd and tragic wreckage. A devastating but essential read." - Kevin Powers
"There is no shortage of wonderful, literate Frankenstein reimaginings but few so viscerally mine Shelley's story for its metaphoric riches." - Booklist
A clear and enjoyable expression of Strawson's dismissal of free will, his avowal of the possibility of panpsychism and his consideration of the arbitrary and experiential characteristics of the self (so to call it).
"I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savoury, like love." Als traverses the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Michel Basquiat and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have been so formative of contemporary culture
"White Girls is a book, a dream, an enemy, a friend, and, yes, the read of the year." - Junot Diaz
An aging member of the once-vibrant youth culture of the 1980s finds himself increasingly at a loss in a society moving at a different pace and a different direction.
"One of the books of the year, if not the decade. No review could do it justice. Seldom has a novel with so much vicious humour and political intent also included moments of beautifully choreographed, unexpected tragedy. Bold and sophisticated, this thrilling, magnificently audacious picaresque is about France and is also about all of us: how loudly we shout, how badly we hurt." - Irish Times
"This is not just a novel, it's an electrocardiogram." - Figaro
Long-listed for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
>> On Despentes's 'hardcore feminism'.
The machinery of cultural production has been co-opted by institutions, corporations and governments in order to further their interests, maximise profits and suppress dissent. A perceptive account of how advertising, media and politics work today.
Zezé is Brazil’s naughtiest and most loveable boy. His talent for mischief matched only by his great kindness. When he grows up he wants to be a poet but for now he entertains himself playing pranks on the residents of his family’s poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood and inventing friends to play with. That is, until he meets a real friend, and his life begins to change.
How has society's attitude to violence changed through history? Why are some activities frowned upon in some ages and lauded in others? Does a turbulent history make a people more violent or less so?
"Wonderfully entertaining, comprehensive and astute." - The Times
Fleeing his abusive father across the desert towards the only person he thinks will understand him, Jaxie comes across an old recluse living in an abandoned shepherd's hut and begins to re-examine the trajectory of his young life.
"Austere, beautiful and compelling, brilliant and uncomfortable." - Sydney Morning Herald
1953. In order to help protect two shearers whose relationship is exposed, will their foreman be forced to come out about his relationship with a fellow soldier in World War One?
"An erudite exploration of the systematic plundering of libraries and book collections by Nazi invaders. Looting books by mainly Jewish owners, collections, and libraries was an effective way of stealing Jewish memory and history, as this thorough work of research by Swedish journalist and editor Rydell attests. An Engrossing, haunting journey for bibliophiles and World War II historians alike." - Kirkus
"We all know the life, but what do we know of the woman who lived it?" The story of a the teenager who eloped with a poet and wrote a book that brought into existence a modern archetype.
>> Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's own hand.
Calypso was a Wayfarer, a small and very popular class of open dinghy, a boat designed for pottering around coastlines and estuaries during the day. But along with the occasional brave crewmate, Clutterbuck managed to sail her across the English Channel, through the Bay of Biscay, down the French canals and into the Mediterranean, then up into the North Sea and the Baltic to Oslo, living aboard for three months at a time. A real-life Swallows and Amazons.
Fossilisation, rocks, the water cycle, volcanoes, glaciers, thunderstorms, geology, ecology - a beautifully illustrated introduction to earth science.
"A novel that lays bare the normality of black family life in suburban London, while revealing its deepest psyche, its tragedies, its hopes and its magic. A wondrous book." - Afua Hirsch
>> The author on losing her twin.
As the dust settled after World War II, America controlled half the world's manufacturing capacity. By the end of the Cold War it possessed nearly half the planet's military forces, spread across eight hundred bases, and much of its wealth. Beyond what was on display, the United States had also built a formidable diplomatic and clandestine apparatus. Indeed, more than anything else, it is this secretive tier of global surveillance and covert operations that distinguishes the US from the great empires of the past. But recent years have seen America's share of the global economy diminish, its diplomatic alliances falter and its claim to moral leadership abandoned. Will China become the dominant nation this century?
The work of the leading contemporary ceramicist, resident in New Zealand since 1995, displays a breadth of influence, from the Bloomsbury Group's Omega Workshop, old English pottery, Memphis and Wedgewood to New Zealand and Pacific indigenous and traditional aesthetics.
>> Visit Vonney Ball's website.
Zelie remembers when the soil of Orisha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zelie's Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were targeted and killed, leaving Zelie without a mother and her people without hope. Now Zelie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. YA fantasy steeped in Nigerian folklore.
"The best sort of book: a hugely enjoyable escapist story that makes you re-examine the world around you. It is a miraculous achievement." - The Guardian
Rust never sleeps, it is working away all the time, converting what we though was solid and permanent into something organic and mutable. Rabate's exploration of the meanings of rust ranges from science into psychology, from investigations of the rust belts in China and the US to the use of rust by artists and architects, to strange ruminations on the connections between rust and blood.
Luggage by Susan Harlan $22
What we carry about with us when every gram counts are carefully curated portraits of the selves we want to be and of the selves we are anxious to escape.
A souvenir certifies a journey but also distorts our memory of it. What has been the changing nature of travel relics, and how do they reflect the traveller more than the place in which it was acquired?
The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger's identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Read an extract.
>> Hear an extract read.
>> The book is short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> A review by Eimear McBride in The Guardian.
>> "An intelligent woman is supposed to raise herself above these anxieties."
>> Arnold Schoenberg's Blue Self-Portrait.
>> The book is published by the exemplary Les Fugitives, a press that publishes only books written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. Visit their website.
>> Other titles from Les Fugitives at VOLUME:
Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (read Thomas's review)
Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi (read Thomas's review)
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (just arrived!)
 | My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci {Reviewed by STELLA} Pajtim Statovci explores entrapment, isolation and dislocation through the two main characters in his debut novel, My Cat Yugoslavia. We meet Bekim - a disenchanted, lonely young man - as he surfs a gay chat room looking for a hook-up. His life as an immigrant - he came to Finland from Kosovo with his parents - is a series of incidents in which he tries not to be noticed and denies his past. At thirty he is living alone, estranged from his family, his closest relationship is with his pet, a boa constrictor, until he meets the audacious and, so Bekim thinks, irresistibly attractive Cat at a gay bar. The Cat, a highly unlikable fellow - arrogant, obnoxious, abusive -moves into Bekim’s flat and invades his controlled life. The second voice in this novel is Emine. The story travels back to 1980 rural Kosovo. Emine at sixteen dreams about a life devoid of the boredom and drudgery of her parents. She seems happy until the day it dawns on her that she isn’t a brilliant student, that she won’t be an actress and is unlikely to have any future apart from the dutiful wife. That this future comes so quickly in her life - she is spotted by the dashing Bajram and an arranged wedding is soon underway - is instantly beguiling (a whirlwind of rituals and gold jewellery) and ultimately terrifying. Bajram is the wolf in lamb’s clothing. Yet more violence is to come - the war, homelessness and the fleeing from Kosovo to Finland. Statovci splices the absurd, the comic and the tragic through these chapters and the voices of son and mother. The idea of a sleek, well-dressed Cat as an abusive interloper shouldn’t really work but it does, as an allegorical agent for aggression - racial and homophobic. The Cat is a tidy parallel to Emine’s husband Bajram - both are forceful, violent and righteous. While Bajram is controlling enough within the confines of his own culture and country, as a refugee the associated humiliations, lack of power and sense of belonging fuel the worst in his behaviour for both Emine and Bekim. Interestingly, the lives and loves of both mother and son run the same gauntlet - similar emotional minefields: they both crave a romantic love relationship based on an ideal, yet find themselves victims of abusive and controlling partners. Statovci like Bekim is Kosovo-born and lives in Finland and, unsurprisingly, his first novel draws on this fractured past. My Cat Yugoslavia draws away from other novels I’ve read set during the Yugoslav War, which have tended to focus on the chaos of the crisis and the abject behaviour of humanity. This novel focuses on the repercussions of war through generations: violence which impacts on the ability to form relationships. Bekim is a gay immigrant unable and unwilling to fit in. He is socially isolated, neither a Kosovar Albanian nor Finnish, not a Muslim yet fingered as different, bereft of a family. It is not surprising that he feels closest to a reptile, his boa constrictor. Emine's story is just as captivating - from her rural, naive beginning to her new life as a wife, and to the unexpected consequences of war - the spirited sixteen-year-old eventually rises again. Statovci writes with a light touch, curling intense emotion into crisp sentences and using the absurd to lead us through disarray. |